M. 3 •Dorothy 
June 23, 1941 
Dr. v/aldo L# Schmitt 
U.3. National Museum 
V/ashington, D* G* 
Dear Dr# Schmitt, 
I have been silent a long time, he^^ring that you had gone south 
and knowing that mail transmission would he very slow* I hear nov/ through 
Harrisan th-at you have returned# I never have gotten it straight, however, 
whether you had been to Panama or the Galapagos Islands or both perhaps# 
xou ve heard what they^ve done to us# And I was all set for going 
home# The Bering Sea Y/ill be a new experience for me, but from whc^t the 
Champio n and the D orothy have to say about it, it v/on’t be at all pleasant# 
Art and I traded places; he is on the Locks now# Mcliillen called 'Wallace 
home for the hearing of the oystor-pulp mill controversy;^! only v/ish that I 
was as important a guy as he. 
It will be so much nicer aboard the D orothy ; the Locks is too sma.ll- 
a 65 ft# Puget Sound seiner-not at all meant to combat the elements of the 
Sea-and so little room. Ghristey is aboard the Dorothy , Carlson aboard the 
Locks ; and we ha^ve almost an entirely nev; crew that was hired in Cordova jf or 
practically the whole fishing roster resigned "’hen the extension went through 
‘th 
ran into lots of crabs this spring-the Doro' 
did, but we saw our share of them* I do not think that we will have 
and Chamoion more 
A Swv' V * 
than we 
the vSame success this summer, for alrea.dy every indication points to their 
having migrated out to deeper waters and have spread# It is most evident 
that they school up in great quantities to mate a,nd moult# 7/e have cleared 
up many points about their habits, but in so doing an equa.l number of questions 
have arisen, but that generally spells progress# The biggest question to me 
nw is whether there isn’t a fall ’’mating-moulting-inshore migration^period to 
a lesser extent than f'at of the spring. The males that ma^te sire all old 
shelled ?/itb no indication of residiness to moult; we have seen several hand- 
shaking pairs and the Jap also told us that# The males that moulted this 
spring on the other hand have spermaries full, and now ( June-two months kfter 
height of moulting season-Kodiak area) on removal of the spermaries the 
spermatophoric bands themselves are distinctly formed# “Jill those males wait 
until next spring, or will they ’’relieve themselves” this fall? If you Yri.ll 
remember we began picking up a few soft males "lien we left Co.noe Bay in early 
October last fall, o.nd o.lso the only peelers (dactyl test) that we found then 
were males# It is my belief that those fall male moulters are tho spring 
maters# 'Je found no soft or peeler females last fall, but for them the 
mating and moulting process is simultaneous, both occurring during the ’’hand- 
shaking” actf and if there was a fall mo.ting season we left before it ho-pponed. 
By far the greater percentage of soft crabs to.ken this spring were females # 
It may be that this second seo-son, if it does occur, only happens in areas 
that we call ’’crab traps”, where there is a population the year round, like 
Ca.noo Bay, Ol^a ^^^d Kachemak Bay(Cook Inlet), where the crabs are more 
subject "in water conditions than they are offshore in deeper waters# 
In Ptivlof Bay the Dorothy and Champion took thousands of crabs, a.nd you 'dll 
remember the futile efforts in Pavlof that we made last fall# 
Each of the boats this soring „ 4.,^ . . ,7 . , . 
& Gagged a thousand crabs -which is the 
